Enjoy All Your Favorite Comfort Foods – GRAIN FREE!

Gingerbread Cookies {Grain Free & Nut Free}

With the holidays approaching I can’t help but get excited about baking fun treats for my family and friends. My three year old daughter loves to bake with me. Yesterday she was really excited about these cookies because we got to use cute cookie cutters! Her face lit up when I gave her this special Gingerbread Man Cookie.

These cookies aren’t crispy like traditional gingerbread cookies. They hold up well but they are soft. We based this recipe off of the recipe in Nourishing Traditions. We substituted coconut flour for the almonds and added an egg to help hold the dough together.

Reader Interactions

29 Comments

Dear coconut mama,
I love this recipe! Beste coconut flour cookie recipe I’ve ever encountered. I’ve made these cookies several times now and my kids love them every time. I use tapioca instead of arrowroot, because the latter is so expensive.

Sometimes I use half of the honey and the other half molasses, for a nice dark wintry cookie. Today I added the peel of one organic orange (I added it to the wet ingredients and used a stick blender to get very small pieces) and it’s delish! If I leave out the spices and add other flavors, like lemon peel, rose syrup or vanilla, I am sure it would be very nice too. This is a perfect basic recipe for experimenting.

I’ve tried plenty of other recipes and none came out so well. I try to bake with coconut flour whenever I can, because it’s affordable and healthier (and more environmentally friendly) than nut flours. Your website is a great help and I consult the recipes often!

I tried this recipe and realised, (after I had made the cookies), that you haven’t mentioned the butter in the instructions. Unfortunately, they haven’t turned out very nice, but have topped them with ginger icing. They’re very healthy because no one will eat them!!

just made these and will definitely will make them again. the house smells wonderful & my lils are munching them now! only question i have is what do you do with the butter? i just put it in at the end and mixed it in! i didnt notice it stating specifically in the above recipe what exactly to do with the butter? my dough was a bit crumbly so i added more water and reshaped often but still was crumbly, (which is the case it seems with all my coconut flour recipes). do you think adding another egg would help with this? thanks so much!

I made these last night, with a few adjustments. I used only 3/4 cup apiece of coconut flour and arrowroot. And instead of honey, I used 1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp. of maple syrup. I also added a teaspoon of baking powder, and used no water. (Incidentally, the recipe above doesn’t say when to add the butter/oil. ;))) The texture of the dough was just right. I formed it into 14 balls, and flattened them on a cookie sheet. Then I baked them at about 325 degrees for about 45 minutes (it took a long time for the cookies to get golden brown and crispy). They tasted really good. If I made them again, I would double the spices, I think, because I didn’t taste them that much.

Another point–most arrowroot on the market is not real arrowroot, which is very expensive. The only brand I’m aware of that is always real arrowroot is Frontier. So, unless you want to settle for cassava starch or some other imitation, make sure you always buy Frontier arrowroot (if you can afford it).

Anyway, thanks for the recipe–I’m digging the cookies. Hope you find these comments helpful. Right now I don’t have room for the cookies in the fridge, but hopefully they’ll keep okay until I do. 🙂

My family and I have recently gone grain-free. The kids have been begging me for a gingerbread house. Would this recipe hold up to that challenge? I’m down to my last cup of coconut flour and I really want to know this will work.
Thanks for sharing this recipe on Facebook!! 🙂

just made these they are super yummy ! I did make changes to the second batch , doubled the spice and used fresh squeezed orange juice instead of water , makes them a little crunchier , thanks so much for this holiday fav!!

Thank you so much for this recipe! My son has been obsessed with gingerbread men since we read him the story, and while I wanted to make some as a little Christmas project with him, I was not sure I could find a good GF recipe. We substituted organic blackstrap molasses for the honey, and it was very tasty, plus, it had the dark rich color of traditional gingerbread.

I found the dough supple and very easy to work with. We rolled it out on silicone mats, and the cut-outs easily transferred to the pan with a spatula (even with my four year old’s dubious “help.” ) When I gathered the scraps to re-roll the dough, it was a bit crumbly and cracking, so I just put it back in the bowl and kneaded a bit of water into it. I did this each time I re-rolled it, and it worked beautifully (I’m not sure if it dried out so much in between because of my son’s grubby little paws overworking the dough, or if it’s just because the coconut flour has so much fiber that it gets drier the longer it sits. At any rate, drizzling a bit of water and re-kneading in between rolling worked perfectly.) We will definitely be using your recipe again. Thanks so much!

I’m going to try to make these. I have some unsulfured Blackstrap Molasses. I’m going to replace the honey with that to make them even more gingerbread-like. I’ll let you know how they turn out! Many thanks!

I was disappointed that this recipe was labelled ‘grain free’ when it has arrowroot powder. It may not be a ‘grain’ but is not allowed in grain-free diets. That being said I have been desperate to find a gingerbread recipe that does not have molasses, so I tried this one. I replaced the arrowroot powder with 1/3 cup coconut flour. It seems to have worked ok – next time I will refrigerate the dough first to make it more ‘rollable’.

I’m sorry you were disappointed! I’ve actually seen many grain free recipes use arrowroot powder and tapioca powder. Arrowroot IS grain free though and is a very healthy ingredient.

“Arrowroot powder is a nutritious food, obtained from the fleshy root stock of a tropical American plant. It is an easily digested food well fitted for infants and the convalescent. It resembles cornstarch in being white, fin and powdery….. Arrowroot was once widely used in baby formulas as a superior carbohydrate, experience having shown it agreed with babies better than any other starch or sugar. We now find the reason. It is the only starch product with a calcium ash. In this regard, the calcium chloride, in the form of calcium found in arrowroot starch, is very important for the maintenance of proper acid and alkali balances in the human body…” – Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon & Mary G. Enig

I used arrowroot powder a lot when I was eating grain free during my pregnancy. I avoided grans, nuts, seeds and legumes to avoid large amounts of phytic acid in my diet. Phytic acid binds with minerals in the body and can cause mineral deficiencies. Arrowroot is very low in phytic acid and does not need to be soaked like nut flours do.

I wonder if Konjac Flour would be a suitable substitute for Arrowroot for those that can not tolerate it. It’s high fiber, but no carbs and it is also a soluble plant fiber. You use much less than regular flour. It is grain free.

They turned out fine, and taste great! I’ve stayed away from honey because it’s so sweet, and I have hypoglycemia. My naturopath did say that honey and maple syrup should be ok for me, and it’s sugar that I’m sensitive to and probably causes low blood sugar. I may try the recipe again with one of the two and see how it goes. Thanks for the reply!

Is it important to use honey in this recipe? I used Agave syrup because it’s lower glycemic. The dough was very finicky to work with. I had to add several tablespoons to make the dough stick together, and it was still very crumbly. I had to squeeze the dough in my hand and roll it to make it form a ball.

Stephanie Numan Scholman » I only reccomend natural sweeteners like honey and maple syrup. Agave is not a natural sweetener. You may of had to let the dough sit for a short while to let the coconut flour soak up some of the liquid.

I’m sorry you had trouble with this recipe :(. Coconut flour can be very difficult to work with sometimes.